CHAPTER I When I was a small boy at the beginning of the century I remember an old man who wore knee-breeches and worsted stockings , and who used to hobble about the street of our village with the help of a stick .
He must have been getting on for eighty in the year 1807 , earlier than which date I suppose I can hardly remember him , for I was born in 1802 .
A few white locks hung about his ears , his shoulders were bent and his knees feeble , but he was still hale , and was much respected in our little world of Paleham .
His name was Pontifex .
His wife was said to be his master ; I have been told she brought him a little money , but it can not have been much .
She was a tall , square-shouldered person ( I have heard my father call her a Gothic woman ) who had insisted on being married to Mr Pontifex when he was young and too good-natured to say nay to any woman who wooed him .
The pair had lived not unhappily together , for Mr Pontifex 's temper was easy and he soon learned to bow before his wife 's more stormy moods .
Mr Pontifex was a carpenter by trade ; he was also at one time parish clerk ; when I remember him , however , he had so far risen in life as to be no longer compelled to work with his own hands .
In his earlier days he had taught himself to draw .
I do not say he drew well , but it was surprising he should draw as well as he did .
My father , who took the living of Paleham about the year 1797 , became possessed of a good many of old Mr Pontifex 's drawings , which were always of local subjects , and so unaffectedly painstaking that they might have passed for the work of some good early master .
I remember them as hanging up framed and glazed in the study at the Rectory , and tinted , as all else in the room was tinted , with the green reflected from the fringe of ivy leaves that grew around the windows .
I wonder how they will actually cease and come to an end as drawings , and into what new phases of being they will then enter .
Not content with being an artist , Mr Pontifex must needs also be a musician .
He built the organ in the church with his own hands , and made a smaller one which he kept in his own house .
He could play as much as he could draw , not very well according to professional standards , but much better than could have been expected .
I myself showed a taste for music at an early age , and old Mr Pontifex on finding it out , as he soon did , became partial to me in consequence .
It may be thought that with so many irons in the fire he could hardly be a very thriving man , but this was not the case .
His father had been a day labourer , and he had himself begun life with no other capital than his good sense and good constitution ; now , however , there was a goodly show of timber about his yard , and a look of solid comfort over his whole establishment .
Towards the close of the eighteenth century and not long before my father came to Paleham , he had taken a farm of about ninety acres , thus making a considerable rise in life .
Along with the farm there went an old-fashioned but comfortable house with a charming garden and an orchard .
The carpenter 's business was now carried on in one of the outhouses that had once been part of some conventual buildings , the remains of which could be seen in what was called the Abbey Close .
The house itself , embosomed in honeysuckles and creeping roses , was an ornament to the whole village , nor were its internal arrangements less exemplary than its outside was ornamental .
Report said that Mrs Pontifex starched the sheets for her best bed , and I can well believe it .
How well do I remember her parlour half filled with the organ which her husband had built , and scented with a withered apple or two from the _ pyrus japonica _ that grew outside the house ; the picture of the prize ox over the chimney-piece , which Mr Pontifex himself had painted ; the transparency of the man coming to show light to a coach upon a snowy night , also by Mr Pontifex ; the little old man and little old woman who told the weather ; the china shepherd and shepherdess ; the jars of feathery flowering grasses with a peacock 's feather or two among them to set them off , and the china bowls full of dead rose leaves dried with bay salt .
All has long since vanished and become a memory , faded but still fragrant to myself .
Nay , but her kitchen -- and the glimpses into a cavernous cellar beyond it , wherefrom came gleams from the pale surfaces of milk cans , or it may be of the arms and face of a milkmaid skimming the cream ; or again her storeroom , where among other treasures she kept the famous lipsalve which was one of her especial glories , and of which she would present a shape yearly to those whom she delighted to honour .
She wrote out the recipe for this and gave it to my mother a year or two before she died , but we could never make it as she did .
When we were children she used sometimes to send her respects to my mother , and ask leave for us to come and take tea with her .
Right well she used to ply us .
As for her temper , we never met such a delightful old lady in our lives ; whatever Mr Pontifex may have had to put up with , we had no cause for complaint , and then Mr Pontifex would play to us upon the organ , and we would stand round him open-mouthed and think him the most wonderfully clever man that ever was born , except of course our papa .
Mrs Pontifex had no sense of humour , at least I can call to mind no signs of this , but her husband had plenty of fun in him , though few would have guessed it from his appearance .
I remember my father once sent me down to his workship to get some glue , and I happened to come when old Pontifex was in the act of scolding his boy .
He had got the lad -- a pudding-headed fellow -- by the ear and was saying , " What ?
Lost again -- smothered o ' wit . "
( I believe it was the boy who was himself supposed to be a wandering soul , and who was thus addressed as lost . )
" Now , look here , my lad , " he continued , " some boys are born stupid , and thou art one of them ; some achieve stupidity -- that 's thee again , Jim -- thou wast both born stupid and hast greatly increased thy birthright -- and some " ( and here came a climax during which the boy 's head and ear were swayed from side to side ) " have stupidity thrust upon them , which , if it please the Lord , shall not be thy case , my lad , for I will thrust stupidity from thee , though I have to box thine ears in doing so , " but I did not see that the old man really did box Jim 's ears , or do more than pretend to frighten him , for the two understood one another perfectly well .
Another time I remember hearing him call the village rat-catcher by saying , " Come hither , thou three-days-and-three-nights , thou , " alluding , as I afterwards learned , to the rat-catcher 's periods of intoxication ; but I will tell no more of such trifles .
My father 's face would always brighten when old Pontifex 's name was mentioned .
" I tell you , Edward , " he would say to me , " old Pontifex was not only an able man , but he was one of the very ablest men that ever I knew . "
This was more than I as a young man was prepared to stand .
" My dear father , " I answered , " what did he do ?
He could draw a little , but could he to save his life have got a picture into the Royal Academy exhibition ?
He built two organs and could play the Minuet in _ Samson _ on one and the March in _ Scipio _ on the other ; he was a good carpenter and a bit of a wag ; he was a good old fellow enough , but why make him out so much abler than he was ? "
" My boy , " returned my father , " you must not judge by the work , but by the work in connection with the surroundings .
Could Giotto or Filippo Lippi , think you , have got a picture into the Exhibition ?
Would a single one of those frescoes we went to see when we were at Padua have the remotest chance of being hung , if it were sent in for exhibition now ?
Why , the Academy people would be so outraged that they would not even write to poor Giotto to tell him to come and take his fresco away .
Phew ! "
continued he , waxing warm , " if old Pontifex had had Cromwell 's chances he would have done all that Cromwell did , and have done it better ; if he had had Giotto 's chances he would have done all that Giotto did , and done it no worse ; as it was , he was a village carpenter , and I will undertake to say he never scamped a job in the whole course of his life . "
" But , " said I , " we can not judge people with so many ' ifs . '
If old Pontifex had lived in Giotto 's time he might have been another Giotto , but he did not live in Giotto 's time . "
" I tell you , Edward , " said my father with some severity , " we must judge men not so much by what they do , as by what they make us feel that they have it in them to do .
If a man has done enough either in painting , music or the affairs of life , to make me feel that I might trust him in an emergency he has done enough .
It is not by what a man has actually put upon his canvas , nor yet by the acts which he has set down , so to speak , upon the canvas of his life that I will judge him , but by what he makes me feel that he felt and aimed at .
If he has made me feel that he felt those things to be loveable which I hold loveable myself I ask no more ; his grammar may have been imperfect , but still I have understood him ; he and I are _ en rapport _ ; and I say again , Edward , that old Pontifex was not only an able man , but one of the very ablest men I ever knew . "